Taking time to thank other Breweries for their bottles

So, while Kristi and I prepare for our brewing tonight I thought I would post about our bottling of the Kolsch beer.  While preparing for bottling we found it is considered better if you transfer the beer to another bucket for bottling.  From what we could tell this was done to minimize the amount of dead yeast you might be transferring to the bottles.  Fortunately, we already had a giant bucket that we were using for sanitizing items so it was mostly cleaned anyways and Kristi finished cleaning it up.  We then moved the beer from the fermenter to the bottling bucket, but keeping in mind that the instructions pointed out how important time was as a factor as we wanted to keep its exposure to oxygen down to a minimum.

Before we could start the bottling process, however, we needed to prepare the corn sugar we were using to add carbonation to the beer.  You may recall in a previous post that we were using sugar pellets before for carbonation, but this batch had a pouch of corn sugar instead.  In this case, we had to prepare the sugar ahead of time by boiling it in 2 cups of water for 5 minutes.  Kristi pointed out we should wait until the water is boiling before adding the sugar so as to ensure we do not accidentally caremelize the sugar and therefor make it useless.  After we were done preparing it and we transferred enough beer from the fermenter to the bottling bucket until it filled about 2 inches from the bottom, at which point we mixed in the sugar mixture, then continued filling up more.  The reason for this sugar is that it creates a second fermentation in the bottle with what yeast is still alive, breaking down more sugars into alcohol, but the byproduct to fermentation is CO2, which is where we get our carbonation from.  I have been finding it interesting every time we observe some part of the process and consider how they must have brewed beer long ago to gain any of these traits.  I imagine they kept the fermenting beer in a closed container and it naturally became carbonated and they didn't understand why.  In any case, we moved on from this point to getting ready for the bottling itself.

We started bottling by pumping all of the beer into the bottles and found placing the tube all the way in worked best as that meant it would continue pumping more beer in within and keep foaming down to a minimum.  We tried to move quickly to keep the oxidation to a minimum, but we quickly discovered as we neared the end of our bottles that we didn't have nearly enough bottles to hold the 5 gallons of beer.  Our solution was to use the many growlers and bottles we had kept from other breweries, though mostly Speakeasy, in order to make up the difference.  So Kristi quickly rinsed them out and used sanitizer on them so that we could use them.  This ended up saving the day, but we also had to move quickly to cap all the beers we had bottled.  This is where having a third person would really come in handy, especially considering a Kolsch especially doesn't do well with oxidation.

For those who are not aware, a Kolsch is typically served in a smaller glass than you traditionally find with other German beers.  The exact reasons as to why this is are not clear to Kristi or myself, but we suspect it has to do with the use of lager yeast in an ale process, which means yeast that generally works best in colder temperatures being exposed to warmer temperatures and therefore something involving the yeast may be more unstable and susceptible to breaking down.  Hopefully I can find some information on the subject, but so far I have not.  Now we just have to wait about 2 weeks until we can try the beer and see how it went.